Jiayue Huang

In May 2022, at EuroPCR- a major international interventional cardiology conference- Jiayue Huang was awarded the Jon DeHaan Foundation prize for Cardiovascular Innovation on behalf of Professor Shengxian Tu from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

The Jon DeHaan Foundation supports those working to advance cardiac medicine. The Foundation provides grants and awards to those who focus on innovative developments in cardiovascular medicine, particularly for academic researchers and start-up companies whose work will have a significant patient impact.

This ground-breaking work is a result of the work of Professor Shengxian Tu and his team at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Pulse Medical. Jiayue is a graduate from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a PhD student at National University of Ireland, Galway, in the Smart Sensors Lab, and has been working on the clinical applications of several new software solutions for the assessment of the coronary circulation.

This particular research allows for the procurement of information that is hidden in an angiogram, without the need for extra catheters or risks to the patient.

Collaboration between Shanghai and NUI Galway allows for the validation of these new approaches in large patient groups, and also for the integration and promotion of their use in the patient workflow.

Jiayue demonstrated the team's original integrated cardiovascular precision to global cardiac interventionists at The European Annual Conference on Percutaneous Cardiovascular Intervention (EuroPCR) - one of the top events in the field of interventional cardiology in the world. The assessment technique was widely appreciated by experts in interventional cardiology present at the conference.

Patients with coronary heart disease need to evaluate the physiological significance of coronary stenosis and plaque stability before undergoing cardiac interventional therapy, and also need to understand the downstream microcirculation status.

At present, to complete the evaluation of these three functions in clinical practice, each patient needs to use invasive consumables and several independent invasive operations. The operation process is complicated, time-consuming and expensive.

The award-winning technology only requires one routine coronary angiography and can calculate quantitative flow ratio (μQFR), microcirculation resistance (AMR) and plaque vulnerability on-line, within minutes.

The radial wall strain (RWS) is the latest original technology proposed by Jiayue and Professor Tu’s team. It is the first time in the world to calculate the radial wall strain of coronary arteries based on coronary angiography images to reflect the plaque stability. Compared with traditional methods for assessing plaque stability based on intravascular imaging (such as intravascular ultrasound or optical coherence tomography), RWS technology does not require any additional consumables and invasive procedures, which significantly reduces the complexity of the assessment.

The study analyzed 824 untreated vessels (non-flow limiting) in the FAVOR III China study. In the multivariable Cox regression model, RWSmax >12% was found as an independent predictor of 1-year vessel-oriented composite endpoint in deferred non-flow limiting vessels. This indicates the enhanced safety of deferred revascularization based on the combination of RWSmax and physiology, compared with the current standard based on physiology guidance alone. Unique in this approach is the fact that both pieces of information are obtained from the simple coronary angiograms analyzed by artificial intelligence.